Gender and International Marriage Migration

Abstract

In the last two decades, the growth of intra-regional marriage migration in Asia has stimulated scholarly interest in destination countries. Marriage migration led to social, demographic, and cultural transformations of current and future generations in these countries, and raised new issues in relation to race, ethnicity, gender, class, and nationality. Recent scholarly work on international marriage migration has moved beyond the so-called mail-order bride discourse and has critically examined various aspects of the experiences of women marriage migrants in affinal families, communities, and societies. Influenced by the postcolonial feminist perspective, a great deal of the ethnographic and qualitative research on international marriage migration focuses on women’s agency, the patriarchal and heteronormative underpinnings of marriage, and incongruous gender relations, as well as the dynamics between local transformations and the global political economy.